I am new to pet collecting but one thing I have noticed is when I am in battle some pets names are in gray, white, green or blue. Perhaps there is a purple but I have yet to see it. Should I not bother with pets who are gray meaning they aren't that great?

Rarity certainly effects hit points and attack damage. So the less rare, the less damage the attack will do compared to a rare version of the exact same pet. Same holds true for hit points, a less rare will have less hit points. So in that sense, you would want a rare over any other.

No, there are no purples that you can obtain....yet. maybe some day, but not yet.

Also, more often than not, for key pets anyways, breed is really more important than rarity. You can always make one rare using a stone later. But finding the right breed usually trumps a given rarity when capturing wild pets. Keep that in mind. Some pets are just very, very, very hard to find (like an Unborn Val'kyr). So if you find one that is a poor quality but is the breed you want, just grab it and stone it later.

For purely collecting purposes, the rarity (the color of the names) won't matter, so if you're just collecting to have them, it's not really important. For pet battling purposes though, you'll want at least green quality, I'd say. Anything below that and you're losing so much in stats that they're really just not viable for combat.

Pets can be stoned to better quality (green and blue) so don't be too quick to release a gray or white quality pet, especially if it's a hard to find pet (i.e. Minfernal) or a pet that's in the breed you're looking for.

The colors obviously work like the colors of items and gear in the game - grey is "vendor trash" level, and it goes all the way up to blue which is rare (players cannot collect above blue).

Wildcherry wrote:I am new to pet collecting but one thing I have noticed is when I am in battle some pets names are in gray, white, green or blue. Perhaps there is a purple but I have yet to see it. Should I not bother with pets who are gray meaning they aren't that great?

Highest pet quality available for now is rare (blue) so of course collecting a rare pet is always preferred.

But as one user said - collecting the right breed is also important. An example is the Flayer YOungling - I've always thought this was a useless pet but then I found the reason my pet was useless - I had the H/H breed, which isn't a very desirable breed for the Flayer Youngling. I'm currently working on leveling up the S/S (Ninja) rare breed I just got. So researching wild pets on WCP you might find that one breed is better than others. If I found the pet to have a high battle rating here at WCP I might check to see what comments were made about preferred breeds. If the battle rating was low (like 3.5 or lower) then I would just go for whatever breed I got with the rare.

Breed aside - some pets are much harder to find in the rare than others - so if you find them, take whatever you can get. Wild Pets hardest to find in the wild: Unborn Val'kyr (Hardest!), Minfernal (also tough to find), Shadow Sporebat, Scorpling, Nexus Whelpling, Scourged Whelpling, Emerald Proto-Drake, Tiny Bog Beast, Wharf Rat and Jade Oozeling. If you are on a high populatin realm you might need to get creative with realm hopping to find some of these pets. If you find them - take what you can get.

In the end - I found that looking for rare breeds was a great way for me to level my other pets. I'd always open up with my carry pet and then have 2 level 25 pets to finish off the battle. But I will say that after an hour of looking for rares if I couldn't find any I would take the uncommon and move on to the next pet.

There are two types of stones related to battle pets: stones that upgrade your pets' quality and stones that grant your pets one level.

Battlestones (quality upgrades) can drop from the Grand Master trainer daily reward bags, and on occasion (sometimes very rarely) they can drop after winning a wild battle. The higher level your opponent, the higher the chance one of these blue stones might drop. I believe queuing up for a PVP Pet Battle also has a chance to reward a stone or two.

There are different kinds of Battle Stones (the stones that let you upgrade a pet to Rare). The most desirable one to drop from pet battles, very rarely, is the Flawless Battle-Stone. This lets you upgrade any pet and can be sold or traded too.

When you're lucky enough to get a stone to drop or find one in a reward bag, it's almost always type-specific. An example is the Flawless Dragonkin Battle-Stone, which can only be used on a Dragonkin-type pet. These are also bind-to-account so can only be used on a pet currently in your Pet Journal.

Note that using either of these kinds of stones, your pet will lose 1 or 2 levels if they're already 15 or above.

At one time the Marked Flawless Battle-Stone wasn't used very often as the requirements for getting one was a bit much. Had to trade in three of the same kind of type-specific stone to get one of these, or 3 tokens from the Celestial Tournament, or spend lots of hours on a one-time achievement battling ALL the pet trainers prior to WoD. Happily this stone can now be bought from the Menagerie vendor in your Level 3 Garrison, using the Pet Charms you've earned from doing the Menagerie daily. It works on any pet type and the pet doesn't lose any levels. It's account-bound.

A further nice bonus for getting your toon to 100 and upgrading to a Level 3 Garrison is the Ultimate Battle-Training Stone. It's a one-time quest reward and not only upgrades any pet to rare, it also instantly raises them to Level 25.